Martin Scorsese goes corporate, Denis Villeneuve sees double, and Clive Owen returns to crime.

Martin Scorsese is returning to New York, albeit to a new neighbourhood. The revered filmmaker, whose last feature was the lavish 3D recreation of 1930s Paris for the children’s/cineastes fantasy Hugo, will take on the city’s financial hub. Scorsese will direct an adaptation, by Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire writer Terence Winter, of Jordan Belfort’s memoir The Wolf of Wall Street, where the former stockbroker recounts the stock manipulation tactics he used to make (and spend) hundreds of millions of dollars in the 1990s, before his arrest and imprisonment in 1998.

Hubris and excess on Wall Street is a popular topic, and Belfort’s disgraced brokerage firm, Stratton Oakmont, has already inspired one feature, Ben Younger’s 2000 drama Boiler Room. Scorsese (pictured), who reportedly starts shooting in August, will up the stakes by bringing in his current leading man, Leonardo DiCaprio. The Wolf of Wall Street will be their fifth feature together (Scorsese previously did eight with Robert De Niro), and the partnership has increasingly served each of them well after the somewhat shaky start a decade ago with Gangs of New York.

Scorsese has been prominent in recent years, not only for his dramatic features but overseeing a handful of crucial music documentaries and his extensive work promoting film preservation as the celluloid era winds down and the digital one begins. He turns 70 in November, and he’s seemingly increased his output since attaining his iconic status. He has two other films as possible 2013 projects: Silence is the story of two Jesuit priests who face persecution in 17th century Japan (one of the clergymen may be played by Daniel Day-Lewis), while Sinatra is a biopic of the legendary singer and actor that has long been talked about but has never secured the right candidate for the title role.

Mark Cavendish withdraws from Milan - San Remo. Photo: Sirotti

UCI sock wars

Sometimes things appear to move so slowly in the corridors of power that it's tempting to accuse the UCI of spending their time on trivial matters while the sport's bigger issues go unaddressed.

Six weeks after Alberto Contador's suspension, Andy Schleck is yet to be officially upgraded as the winner of the 2010 Tour de France, according to the results on the official Tour website. Plans for a breakaway competition designed to offer teams better long-term security are reportedly continuing. Saxo Bank continues to compete at the spring classics, with no word on whether the team will lose points because of Contador's suspension and be stripped of its WorldTour status. Rules around bad weather remain undefined, as Garmin-Cervelo boss Jonathan Vaughters pointed out after Wednesday's snow-hit confusathon at the Volta a Catalunya.

Global gaming company, Zynga has reportedly paid $200million for OMGPOP, the six year old start-up firm that is behind the Draw Something application which is sitting at the top of the application charts in many parts of the world?

But what happens when a company exhausts online gaming growth?

The answer? Go to the real world.

Matt White (L), director of the team GreenEDGE and GreeEDGE owner Gerry Ryan (C) communicates with a rider as they drive in the team car during stage 1 of the 2012 Tour Down Under. (Getty Images)

Anthony Tan remains unsure how much a sport director contributes to a victory, but in the case of GreenEDGE DS Matthew White, it appears to be no small amount.

He is a force of nature. Just having him in the vicinity raises your energy levels. Blessed with the classic Aussie dry wit that often reduces people to hysterics, he was also perceptive enough to notice if there was something wrong. He’s a good listener who always finds the right moment to come and chat; that ensured that everybody wanted to talk to Whitey.With GreenEDGE on a roll it seems timely to talk about the man perhaps most instrumental behind the team’s most important victories to date: Matt White.

If you saw their ‘Backstage Pass’ video from Milan-San Remo, you would’ve seen White do a lot of things: a whole lot of talking; a lot of encouraging; a modicum of pacifying (“I let Sebastian [Langeveld] and [Matthew] Gossy know that Simon had gotten over the top with Fabian [Cancellara] and [Vincenzo] Nibali,” White said on the information he gave via race radio, once Gerrans had crested the final climb of the Poggio in the lead group. “That’s all I said. At this stage in the race, it’s better to say nothing. They need full concentration for the descent.”); and, when Simon Gerrans crossed the line on Sanremo’s Lungomare Italo Calvino, an ear-piercing cacophony of screaming and wailing. The latter wasn’t just him – the entire GreenEDGE bus was in delirium, and probably still is (cue ‘doof-doof’ music, thanks maestro).

I’ve often wondered exactly how much a sport director does behind the wheel in a race, and if today’s riders were to race without radios in the WorldTour, as is the UCI wont, how the results would change, if at all.

I now have geese. Well, ganders. Two of them. I’d been keen to get them for a while, as they’re supposed to be good watch dogs for the chooks, they eat grass, and I reckon they taste pretty good. Sadie doesn’t like them, in the flesh, or as flesh, so I’m on my own with these.

They’re on their own, too, after I spied wedge-tailed eagles flying over the farm. Chooks, even if I did get the geese to keep watch over them, are likely to lose their young or even themselves to an eagle. So Laverne and Shirley (I know, they’re ganders, but I can’t help myself) are now ensconced on Fat Pig Farm as close buddies, decked out in brilliant white feathers and going nowhere near the shelter I brought in specially. They have no chooks to boss around and nothing but themselves to keep an eye out for, and they’re loving their new home.

I had to leave home recently, to attend a writer’s festival in Perth. And the most common question, as is often asked, is, do I miss being a restaurant critic. One morning, I ate in a café where the “fresh” juice was, I guess, fresh from a bottle, and the whole exercise a cynical money grab from a place that once enjoyed a fine reputation. One night, I ate a steak that had about half the flavour of one I last had from my farm, and the riverside bistro that forgot my coffee and served the blandest toast and a croque madame minus any mustard or béchamel was just plain ordinary. I’m glad I don’t have to eat in places like that for a living. To find one good one, I used to eat in five bad ones. Luckily, I did discover Greenhouse and ate brekky there every day, including a second breakfast on the day I was dudded elsewhere. And the best meal of the trip was at my friend Jan’s house.

Google Map screenshot of Centennial Park (CC)

Every few years an idea that seeks to place cyclists firmly outside user plans for the greenest and most used social space in the heart of Sydney is floated, notes Philip Gomes.

The Centennial Park and Moore Park Trust that manages Centennial Park has called for submissions from interested stakeholders on a plan called the Grand Drive Safety Improvement Project with two of the suggestions the placement of speed humps on the drive and further reduced speed limits. One of our key areas of visitor safety concern at Centennial Parklands is the management of traffic flows in Centennial Park, and in particular the convergence of motor vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians and other park users on Grand Drive
I've always felt that calling the main thoroughfare through and around Centennial Park the 'Grand Drive' was ironic, an unintended tip of the hat to the cars that ate the park and the users everyone spends most of their time trying to appease.

Interestingly, the most enjoyable and popular periods for all users of the park are the car free days, you would think they would get the hint.

Needless to say the speed hump and 20km/h provisions, if implemented, would kill most serious recreational cycling in the park stone-cold dead. And to call a speed hump 'cycling friendly' is another sign that the park is influenced by thinkers that know nothing about cycling.

  With Apple's US$10billion share buyback and dividend plan announced, one big question has been answered.

What will the world’s biggest company do with its $95billion pile of cash.

But now, another has emerged.

Which is the next big technology giant, with a massive war chest, to also reward shareholders with regular payments?

A senior pastor at St. James AME Church leads people in a prayer at the Titusville Courthouse in Florida. (AAP)

The shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida by a vigilante has opened up a hot debate about race.

On the night of Sunday, February 26, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin walked out the front door of his father's house in a gated community in Sanford, Florida.

Martin had been watching a college basketball tournament on TV and had headed out to a nearby 7-11 store to buy some Skittles and ice tea.

He made his purchase but never made it home.

In the thick of it ... but Boonen now says he tries to stay out of danger in the sprints. (Getty Images)

Three-time Paris-Roubaix winner Tom Boonen is back to his best and mixing it with some of the fastest men in the peloton, however the veteran classics specialist has also noticed a new and perhaps reckless aggression at the close of races.

Reflecting on the capricious nature of sprinting, the 2005 world road champion wrote on his blog that once the "bullet" has been fired there's not much left but instinct in the run up to the finish.

"Sprinting is not only hard riding on a bike," Boonen wrote. "The most important job is done beforehand when you load your revolver. The brain is 100 per cent active at that moment: left, right, that wheel, there's a hole. From one decision to another. Around you it is chaos, a wall of sound. Your receptors are incredibly sharp. Eyes, ears and feeling: they are working perfectly. As a human you are on the top of your being."

In last weekend's Milan-San Remo Boonen experienced all the chaos that comes as a race enters its final moments, with his quest to improve on his 2007 third place at La Classica di Primavera stopped in its tracks on the back side of the Poggio.

The Australian playwright will make his film directing debut with an adaptation of his maiden novel.

Playwright Stephen Sewell started writing novels primarily because he was tired of trying for years to raise the money from government agencies to help turn his scripts into films.

So there’s an undoubted irony in the fact that Sewell is getting ready to direct his first movie, Babylon, based on his maiden novel, later this year.

Sewell is working with a producer, whom he declines to name pending an imminent official announcement of the project, who’s confident of raising the funds without going through Screen Australia. Casting is underway, Sewell is figuring out the CGI component of the budget and it’ll probably shoot in either Western Australia or South Australia.